Bruce Tomlin

The button with the word "RESET" on it has nothing to do with the CPU reset, which seems to be your problem. EDIT: the reset circuit seems to be C53 (.1uf), R46 (2.2M), and U10 (4013). I doubt it's the chip, but it is CMOS, so who knows.

In which way does it "never work"? Does it not stay on the first time? Does it not seem to start running? (The latter might indicate that the reset circuit isn't working right.)

I found two different versions of it over the past 10-15 years or so, but never got either one to work. Then I got a Catweasel and was able to image all my old TRS-80 floppies easily.

Why are you so obsessed with this? It was never meant to be used for anything but non-interactive broadcast TV. It is not simply modulating a signal like NTSC RF. If all you want is one cable, that's what HDMI is for. Even if you do put it in, ATSC will have lag (because you're compressing to MPEG then uncompressing again), and you do not want to play any video game like that. Modern LCD TV sets can be bad enough with lag on their own from video reprocessing. Trust me, it will suck, and it will suck mightly. And it will not suck cheaply. And it will suck.

PS1 Barbie Super Sports (complete) - $2 PS1 Pitfall 3D (complete) $1.50 Apple Bluetooth keyboard (the older style with real keys) - $3 and a few assorted PS1 instructions and back sheets, including Mega Man Legends

Good to see Vic still doing stuff... but please no more of that "Yo dawg, we heard ourselves say the original was too easy so we made it super hard to appeal to the tiny niche of hardcore gamers who want to play import RPGs" thing from WD again, please. (selectable hard mode good, forced hard mode BAD)

So Curt, you have GCC's original tapeout files and are converting them to a modern format? Nice. Of course the next step is VHDL or Verilog, but it should be much more accurate with the complete original design to work from. As for the ports thing, I don't have a problem with someone porting a rarely-ported game, or a good non-coin-op game that only appeared on a rare system. But when someone ports a mediocre game instead of coming up with something original, that's not so good.

I'd have to agree with that. Starting with that cursor arrow that looked like it was drawn with a crayon. I know the reason was so they could be used with cheap TV sets, but I think the crappy resolution of cheap TV sets was a big problem with the "home computer" industry. Okay for games, crappy for doing "serious" stuff. S-video really wasn't around then, except in the 2-plug version used by Commodore, and even then the monitor wasn't exactly cheap. But a good monitor, even 640x480 15" VGA, was a lot more expensive. The Mac wasn't exactly cheap, and it didn't have color, but damn the picture was sharp. And it was a decent size for the day. USB didn't even exist until 1996. That's quite a long time after the "home computer" market vanished. IDE didn't get decent until 1994 or so with EIDE. In fact, the reason Apple ended up with so many dead-end hardware technologies was that they needed these things beore there was a good industry standard, and had to pick something, sometimes making their own. Then the market finally picked something else. ADB, Appletalk, Nubus and SCSI. Firewire was a partial success (yes, Apple invented it), and still works better than USB at equivalent speeds.

That does point out one of the reasons the Mac stayed around. Maybe not from the inception of the project, but at least from the time they decided to use the 68000 (instead of the 6809) and pillage the Lisa project, the decision was made that Thou Shalt Not Talk Directly To The Hardware, with the penalty being that the hardware was not guaranteed to remain the same. This worked because they did such a good job on optimizing the code in ROM (particularly Quickdraw) that you wouldn't want to do it yourself, and on providing such a big API. They also left enough abstraction (and found enough ways to hide more data in structures used by the ROM) to keep stuff working after doing something major like adding color. Even those who played fast and loose with holes in the API (like the high bit of pointers) eventually paid the price. It also helped that 1) the 68000 was backward compatible with only certain changes like exception handling, and 2) the awesome 68000 emulator that was put into the PPC Macs that let 68000 code run at a similar speed to the CPU chips that the PPC replaced, and as an almost completely equal citizen. There's stuff from back in the '80s that would still run under Classic on a PPC OS X Mac.

C doesn't know jack about bank switching. You have to know where your banks are, make sure the code for each bank goes to the right part of the image (linker scripts), then you need to make some way to go back and forth between the banks. If the whole of ROM is swapping out, then you either need "trampoline" code in RAM (of which the CV only has 1K to begin with), or you need to have certain parts of ROM be the same in all banks. This is why the 7800-style bank switching is so good: one static 16K area, and another 16K area which contains the current bank. Then you get a whole 16K for the code that sticks around, which can call code or access data in other banks as necessary. This works best for games in which there isn't any inter-dependency between banks, such as games with lots of levels or RPGs with lots of areas. The other benefit of this style of bank switching is that you can extend it as far as 4 megabytes by just adding more bank address latches. In any case, there's still a basic problem in that since the CV never had bank switching back in the day, you will get no emulator support unless you add it yourself. Emulators are important because they make your development cycle so much faster, especially with their zero load times. Even with a decent dev cart that has been built with some way to load it, still takes time to reload after you make a change. And the more ROM you're filling, the more stuff you have to debug, which means that many more reload cycles. That's the real reason I gave up on trying to make a game that would break the 32K barrier.

The best part is that this stupid glop-top board is... BROKEN! Note that while it's not a typical "glop-top" because of that square on top, it's the same principle. Chip die mounted to circuit board, wired directly to board, then covered with a glop of epoxy. This is the farthest you can get from a prototype... these are for high quantity manufacturing. I seem to recall there are a few unreleased games that made it to manufacturing but never got sold (Dukes of Hazzard?) and some of those may have been of glop-top boards. But they're still not prototypes, and they're basically worthless if broken. EDIT: oh wow, and a 30-day auction with no BIN? Longer time to find a sucker, but long enough for them not to care.

Or you could just search google for "vhs cases no hub" and find something like this at 50 cases for $20, includes cover sheet sleeve. Shipping adds another $12.50, but that's offset by not coming with Barney propaganda that needs to be disposed of.

So what about making a floppy drive emulator? (SD card or PC, it doesn't matter) Just program a modern microcontroller to talk on AdamNet, and claim to be a big floppy drive. I'd be surprised if someone already hasn't made one. I've got a schematic of the CPU side of the Adam floppy, did anyone ever get a dump of the code? (I am aware that it was a mask ROM inside the CPU, which makes it a bit harder than it would be otherwise.) There's also supposed to be AdamNet source code out there, but I couldn't find it with fifteen minutes or so of searching. Of course reading an actual Adam floppy is trivial to anyone with a Catweasel, since it's just standard single-density sectors.

The problem is that designing the things does not come for free. And if you're designing a whole new computer from scratch, you have to create an infrastructure for it from scratch too. It was a lot cheaper to make yet another 8088 PC clone, and you didn't have to create a whole new set of software for it. BASIC only mattered because in the early days, most of the people who wanted computers wanted them to program. After a transition through "a way to run someone else's program slowly" until the 16-bit era meant enough memory for compilers (yes you could run one on an 8-bit but was slow and cramped), it stopped mattering at all. Apple got lucky. They were hurting multiple times, and Desktop Publishing was probably what gave them any chance at all at first. (It certainly wasn't games.) None of the others could keep their focus long enough. (Focus meaning sticking with their core competency, rather than, say, Coleco trying to turn a very decent video game system into a crappy kludge of a computer because "everybody knew" that video game consoles were dead and home computers were the new hawtness.)

Well, that's kind of clever. And as I recall, the entire 6000-7FFF range is multiple mirrors of the 1K RAM, so this wouldn't even be a problem when using expanded RAM.

Old stuff, definitely keep unless of course it's a modern price tag (flea market, thrift store, etc.) Newer stuff, even DVDs, I peel off all the stickers (including the "dogbone") and stick them to the inside of the case under the booklet of a DVD case or the back of a CD case.

Or if you already have a hacked PSP, install PicoDrive.

As far as "demo" discs go, this is one of the better ones. And the most effective way to region mod a Saturn is to put in a region switch. A DPDT switch is sufficient for US/JP. (Should you want EU and PAL, it's much more complicated.) But this is not a trivial mod, it takes half an hour just disassembling and reassembling the Saturn, and if you let your switch dangle out the battery door, its wires will eventually break inside, so you really need to get a small switch that you can mount to one of the rear vent slots.

I'm pretty sure that the CV can't use Atari paddles because it's not wired for them. The driving controllers would be possible, but the 16 transitions per rotation of a stock controller might be less than desirable.

The keyboard itself isn't rarity 9. The cartridges are the rare part. The same keyboard is used for all the various systems (NES, SNES, Genesis, and various computers), with only the cable being different. It supports both RS-232 (up to 56000 baud I think) and an NES-style serial interface. I got the Sega Genesis cartridge loose, and had to reverse-engineer the Sega Genesis cable pinout. I disassembled the code and found it was sending MIDI commands via NES-style communication, then I had to find the NES cable pinout to know what pins were used on the piano side. I got lucky that someone had printed out a pinout from a web page that was gone and didn't get saved on archive.org. He was able to find the paper printout and I was able to make my cable. NES/SNES/Genesis to Miracle Piano cable ======================================= (all pinouts looking at the connector on the console) 1 [1 2 3 4|5 6 7) 2 7 ___________ 3 6 ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) 4 5 \_6_7_8_9_/ SNES NES Genesis Piano Vcc 1 7 5 Clock 2 2 9 19 Latch 3 3 7 13 Data 4 4 1 10 D3 5 D2 6 GND 7 1 8 7 Mac mini-DIN-8 to Miracle Piano cable ===================================== ______ / | Mac mini-DIN-8 / 1__o DB-25 ______/_14 | (note: pin 1 connected ______________|_____|_____ 2 | to shield of DB-25) (1) (2) | o_____|__15 | ___________|_____________|_____|_____ 3 | | | | | 16 | (3) (4) (5) | | 4 | |___o______________o | 17 | | | | 5 | (6) (7) (* | | 18 | | | 6 | * pin 8 should be | | 19 | grounded, but wasn't |_____|______7 | in my cable | 20 | |~~~~~~8~~| Mac: 1=HSKo 2=HSKi 3=TxD- 4=Gnd 5=RxD- 6=TxD+ 7=GPi 8=RxD+ Piano: 1=shield 2=RxD 3=TxD 7=GND 14,15=??? (connect to ground) Basically, this is a standard serial cable, plus pins 14 and 15 are grounded for some reason, probably to select RS-232 mode. PC DB-9 to Miracle Piano cable ============================== 2 - 3 3 - 2 7,14,15 - 5 A schematic diagram of the PC DB-9 cable can be found at: http://www.electrongate.com/wpd/atcab.pdf

The main reason not to disable the atari logo is that the signature check still runs, so you would have a blank screen for that time. It's not like the Colecovision's startup screen that is just running a LONG delay loop. It's not so bad when only 4K of the game is signed, but a whole 16K would keep the screen blank for like a whole second. And it's a kind of cool startup logo anyhow.

They also only happen when you have a DLL around to trigger them.

I think there are bent-metal-only battery holders that you can slide a battery into. If anyone finds a source for these that fit CR2032 cells, it would be a good thing. But there's no way you're going to get the PC motherboard battery holders to fit in a cartridge when mounted on the board.

The trend these days is away from easily replaceable batteries. They need extra casing, which gives extra weight and takes away from the space available for the batteries. While there are exceptions like the iPod which are difficult to disassemble to change the batteries, most things at least have batteries that can be replaced with a little screwdriver work when they wear out.

WD-40? Heathens! This is what Goo-Gone is for. EDIT: I wasn't able to read all the messages in the thread, and that it was about faceplate thingies, not paper stickers. But the ColecoVision ones I just peel off. Goo Gone is still good stuff.